April 1, 1961; a child was born to the proud parents: Julie and Larry Bomb. His name was Henry. His eyes were winter grey, and his hair a deep, lustrous black.

As Henry grew older, his parents noticed his knack for inventing strange objects, like the pickled pizza or the Tarantula powered motor boat.

Henry didn’t ever bring friends home; in fact, he never made friends at all. After his primary schooling, Henry focused more on the math and science subjects rather than literature or history. This habit showed more and more the farther he went in high school and college. Henry tested out of all the freshman and sophomore classes, so he immediately achieved junior status on campus. Although he kept to himself, he was widely known for his random spurts about Newton’s Laws, or his ramblings about fictional characters existing long before humans.

His social awkwardness deemed him an outcast, but it didn’t seem to matter to him. All he wanted was to start work on his project. He had been researching it for the five years he spent as an undergraduate, and when he graduated, he got the chance to meet the leading Professor at the Genetics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As they began to talk, the Professor talked Henry into going back for his Master’s Degree, and then eventually on to his Doctoral Degree.

After graduating Harvard in the spring of 1985, Henry immediately went to work for Genetics Institute starting out as a Lab Technician. His slow days of following orders from respected doctors got the better of him. Soon, he was asking for promotions and raises until he was credited for being a doctor himself.

He soon started work on the project he had begun research on so many years before. Naming the test tube vial X-Lab wasn’t just a scientific name for his creation, it would be his life work. X-Lab had started out as no more than a simple light switch game with a few human genes, but soon he found he could modify how the human would react if these genes were to be turned on during incubation.

More and more research resulted in the same unknown question: the human could adapt to the change, but could they survive? Eventually deciding it had come to no other option; he left Genetics Institute to begin his own laboratory, hence the X-Lab.

After hiring workers to do the research, Henry felt he had more time to work on his ‘child.’ His child was a female egg that had been donated by a hospital, and a male sperm donated by another hospital. He knew exactly how he wanted it to turn out, and it wasn’t going to fail. After inserting the genetic code for the number one chromosome to produce enough proteins to turn on the Lemphotonic (Brain matter), Marrosmatic (Nervous system), and Hiliogigner (Intellectual Advantage) genes on the short arm of the seventh chromosome, he let it incubate for around twenty-seven hours.

Upon his return, he found the fetus had already burst through the test tube because of its enormous accelerated growth, and lay dead on the counter. More and more times resulted in failure. Finally his experimenting succeeded. On his 35,874th attempt, he succeeded in keeping the fetus alive long enough to be removed from the incubator and grow like a human child. It was a girl, blonde hair, green eyes, and pale skin.

Though her incubation process was less than half that of a normal human fetus, her childhood years stretched on as if she really were normal. This puzzled him, so he decided to try to alter the genes of the children who were already farther in the incubation process than 35874 when receiving new proteins.

His X-Lab was extended to two other continents to bring in children for testing. China and Britain were the two lucky countries that got to play host to the secretive X-Labs. New dormitories were built onto the American X-Lab, along with ones being built with the new Labs.

The girl was resistant and hesitant on everything he tried to make her do, but he was sure he could condition her enough it wouldn’t be a problem. Soon the American X-Lab became overcrowded, and they sent some children to the other labs across the ocean. By accident, 35874 was sent to Britain along with nine-hundred other children. It took them years to find out to which lab she had accidently been shipped.

She didn’t even remember Henry when they finally found her, only a distant face from the past.

Her story starts now.

Copyright © 2011 Amanda Woodson. All rights reserved.